Читать книгу Rocket Boys - Homer Hickam, Homer H. Hickam - Страница 13

ON JANUARY 31, 1958, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), led by Dr. von Braun, was ready to launch the Explorer-1 satellite aboard a Jupiter-C rocket. It was to be a night launch, so I stayed up to watch television, hoping for good news. Around 11:00 P.M., a bulletin interrupted the Tonight Show with an announcement that the launch had been a success. Film of the launch was promised momentarily. I started a vigil, lying on the rug in front of the television set, staring at the set, which displayed nothing but a sign stating STAND BY. Mom, Dad, and Jim had long since gone to bed. Daisy Mae joined me on the rug, curling up behind me in the bend of my knees. The bitter cold outside had also chased our old torn Lucifer in, and he was curled up in Dad’s easy chair. It was good to have them as company. I reached back and patted Daisy Mae’s head. “Good old girl,” I told her. “Good old cat.” She rewarded me with a purr and a lick on my hand.

Daisy Mae was a pretty cat, a fluffy calico, and was special to me. Four years earlier, when she had wandered in from the mountains, I hid her for a day, secretly feeding her in the basement. When Mom discovered her, she said I’d have to find the kitten another home, pointing out we already had two dogs, a squirrel, and a cat, and that was enough animals. After I pouted about it for a day, Mom gave in. “If you want this kitten,” she said, “you’ll have to take care of her.” I readily agreed, easy enough to do (the agreeing part). Daisy Mae had kittens right off, a pretty litter quickly snapped up by the neighbors. By then, Mom had completely adopted her into the family and, as I knew she would, took care of her as she did all the other animals, feeding her and spending hours picking fleas out of her coat. Mom thought Daisy Mae was such a pretty but delicate cat that she decided we’d have her fixed. To my knowledge, no other cat or dog in Coalwood had ever been neutered before. Mom drove Dad’s Buick with me holding Daisy Mae on my lap all the way to the veterinarian over in Bluefield, forty miles and six mountains away. It was the first time any of our animals had ever seen a vet. After she healed, Daisy Mae became even more loving, waiting for me to come home from school and sleeping on my bed at night. I often talked to her before I went to sleep, especially when I was frightened, or worried. She was just a comfort when everybody else in the family seemed at odds. Of course, I never told anyone else I talked to my cat, certainly not any of the other boys. I’d have never lived it down.

Around midnight (it was a Friday and not a school night), I was surprised by a knock on the front door, and in came Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell to join me. They bedded down on the couch and the floor. We talked some, mostly about girls, but then O’Dell and Sherman kind of drifted off. I’d been meaning to ask Roy Lee about the spot on Dad’s lung, so I took the opportunity. He tucked himself in the corner of the couch and gave me a worried look. “I’ll ask Billy,” he said. Billy was his brother.

“Don’t tell him why. Dad doesn’t want anybody to know.”

Roy Lee gave me a funny look. “Sonny, I already knew. I guess everybody in Coalwood knows.”

I put my head down on the rug and pretty soon I went to sleep. I woke during the night, finding the picture on the television turned to snow. I kept waking up and falling back to sleep. At dawn, I was awake when the picture flickered back on and an announcer said to stand by. I woke the others up and then, without preamble, film of the launch was run. Dr. von Braun’s rocket lifted off the pad in a caldron of fire and smoke and went right up into the night sky without a moment of hesitation. We whooped and cheered at the sight of it. O’Dell got up and did a little jig and then fell back on the couch and put his feet up in the air and made like he was riding a bicycle. I wasn’t so demonstrative, but I felt proud and patriotic. Dad came downstairs, let Lucifer and Daisy Mae out, and found us boys clustered around the set. He looked us over. “Did it work?”

It was the first time I remember him ever expressing any interest in space. “Yessir!” we roared.

He stared at the television, where Dr. von Braun’s rocket kept taking off again and again. “I don’t know what to make of it,” he said. I’d never heard him say anything like that before.

“We’re going into space, Dad,” I said, by way of an explanation.

“Little man,” he replied, “in your case, I think sometimes you’re already there.” I took that as a compliment and beamed. He looked back at me with his eyebrows raised.

Mom appeared in her housecoat. She smiled drowsily at me and the other boys. “Did it work?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“I think that’s wonderful. Don’t you, Homer?”

Dad had gone to the kitchen. “Wonderful,” he said, his voice afar.

Mom looked us over. “You boys want some breakfast? How about some waffles?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Later that same day, I gathered Roy Lee, Sherman, and O’Dell in my room. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said.

Roy Lee fell back on the bed and groaned. “Every time you say that, we always end up in trouble.”

I laid out my plan. I was forming a rocket club to be called the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA), named in imitation of von Braun’s ABMA. Quentin and I were going to be in it. We were going to learn all there was about rockets and start building them. This was to be a serious thing, not playing. If the others wanted to join us, they were welcome. I figured Roy Lee would get up and walk out rather than belong to anything with Quentin in it, but instead he sat up on the bed and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Sonny, I like it. It sounds like fun. Count me in.” I think he was inspired by the success of the Explorer. Sherman and O’Dell readily agreed too.

“The Big Creek Missile Agency is hereby formed,” I said. “I’m the president. O’Dell, I’d like for you to be the treasurer and in charge of supplies. Roy Lee, because you’ve got a car, we’ll need for you to handle transportation. Sherman, if you’d take care of publicity and setting up our rocket range, I’d appreciate it. Quentin is going to be our scientist. Any questions?”

Roy Lee said, “Any girls in this club, or do you have to have a rocket in your pocket?”

“Or in your case a pencil,” O’Dell jeered at Roy Lee.

“You oughta know,” Roy Lee replied, his eyebrows dancing. O’Dell blushed. Trading insults with Roy Lee was never a good idea, even for a bright kid like O’Dell.

“Where’s our rocket range going to be?” Sherman asked me.

“We’ll have to think on that,” I said.

“There’s an old slack dump up behind the mine,” Sherman said. “That might do.”

Slack was the tailings of the mine, coal with too much rock in it. Wherever it was dumped, nothing grew. I thought Sherman had a good idea. “We’ll try it,” I agreed.

“So what do we do now?” O’Dell asked.

“We build a rocket.”

“How?”

“Got to work on that,” I admitted.

After we finished our meeting, not deciding anything else except what time we were going to meet the following weekend, the boys went home. I stopped Roy Lee at the door. “Don’t ask your brother about Dad’s spot,” I said.

Roy Lee nodded. “You don’t want to know how bad it is?”

“No, I don’t.” That about summed it up. I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

AT lunch during the following days, Quentin and I worked on how to build a rocket, sketching out crude drawings and theorizing. We were proceeding mostly by instinct. Despite a search from top to bottom at the McDowell County Library, Quentin still couldn’t find any books to help us. While we worked, both of us ate out of my lunch bag. He told me he usually skipped lunch because eating too much was unhealthy. I noticed, however, that his health regimen didn’t keep him from eating more than half of my food. When I mentioned this to Mom, she started putting in an extra sandwich because, she said, “You’re a growing boy.” I wasn’t fooled. She might as well have written QUENTIN on it in big capital letters.

One day, on our way to class after lunch, Quentin and I were walking past the Big Creek football trophy case, just outside the principal’s office, when he stopped and put his hand on the glass. “Maybe one day we’ll have a trophy in here, Sonny, for our rockets.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Absolutely not. Every spring, science students present their projects for judging at the county science fair. If you win there, you go to the state and then to the nationals. Big Creek’s never won anything, but I bet we could with our rockets.”

Quentin and I saw their reflections in the case when they came up behind us—Buck and some of the other football boys, looking huge in their green and white letter jackets. “What the hell you two morons doing in front of our trophies?” Buck demanded. He squinted past us. “Oh, no! Is that your filthy handprint on our trophy case?”

“Let’s murder these sisters,” a tackle snarled. A growl of agreement rose from the assembled giants.

We turned to face them. “I assure you chaps—” Quentin started to explain.

“I assure you chaps!” Buck mocked Quentin. “You really are a little sister, ain’t you?” He bulled his face in close to us, his chin prickly with whiskers. There was a brown chewing-tobacco stain in the lower left corner of his mouth. I could smell its sweetness on his breath. “I assure you I’m gonna kick your chapped tails. You especially, Sonny. I still owe you, big time.”

Jim came by, his latest girl on his arm. He eased her on down the hall and came over to see what was going on. He saw it was me and said, “Leave them alone, Buck.”

Jim could take him apart and Buck knew it. “I wasn’t going to hurt your little four-eyed sister moron brother,” Buck said, lying through his teeth. “But this little sister,” he said, nodding at Quentin, “I’m going to kick his tail.”

“You can kick both their tails for all I care, but do it somewhere else,” Jim said, dispelling any thought I might have had that he cared anything about me. He nodded toward the principal’s office. “I just don’t want the team to get into any trouble.”

Mr. Turner strutted out of his office at that moment. A young woman was with him. I recognized her as Miss Riley, a Concord College senior assigned to Big Creek as a student science teacher. If what I heard was correct, she would be teaching us chemistry next year. Mr. Turner was a banty-rooster kind of man who kept the entire school under his thumb. He took one look at the assembly in front of the trophy case and said, “If this hall isn’t cleared of boys with letter jackets in two seconds, I know who won’t be playing football anymore.”

Jim and Buck and the football players disappeared, almost as if they got sucked up into the ceiling, leaving Quentin and me standing exposed. Mr. Turner looked us over. “Are you two boys plotting something nefarious?”

Quentin was frightened into honesty. Besides that, he understood what nefarious meant. “I was just telling Sonny,” he said, “I think someday there will be a trophy in here for the Big Creek Missle Agency.”

Mr. Turner frowned deeply. “And what, pray tell, is the Big Creek Missile Agency?”

“Our rocket club,” I said when Quentin hesitated.

He looked at me closely. “Mr. Hickam, isn’t it? Jim’s brother? Did I not hear that you blew up your mother’s rose-garden fence? That sounds much more like a bomb than a rocket. Gentlemen, let me make this perfectly clear to you. I will not tolerate a bomb club in my school. And as for trophies, Mr. Hickam, your brother and the football team don’t need your help.”

“But I think these boys have a wonderful idea, Mr. Turner,” Miss Riley said. She smiled at me. She had an impish, freckled face. “I graduated from this high school,” she said, “and all I ever heard was football, football, football. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if science was another way to get in this trophy case?”

“That’s just what I was saying, Miss Riley!” Quentin blurted.

“I am disciplining these boys at present, Miss Riley,” Mr. Turner said, shooting Quentin a warning look. The bell rang and students started to stream into classrooms up and down the hall. “Well?” Mr. Turner demanded of us. “Don’t you have classes?”

“I’m in charge of helping students prepare for the county science fair,” Miss Riley said to us over the noise of the throng. “If you boys are interested, come and talk to me.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Quentin chirped.

I felt like strangling Quentin. All we had done was blow up a fence and stink up Coalwood with our failures. It was embarrassing. “We can’t be in any science fair,” I muttered.

Miss Riley studied me. It felt as if she could see right through me. “Why not, Sonny?”

“We just can’t,” I repeated stubbornly. I didn’t want to explain. I just wanted to get off the subject.

“Go away, boys,” Mr. Turner waved. “Quickly, now.”

I was grateful for the excuse to get away and ran for it. With his big briefcase practically dragging on the floor, Quentin couldn’t get anywhere too fast, but he caught me while I waited for the other students to file inside the door to history class. “Listen, Sonny,” he gasped, catching his breath, “we win the science fair with our rockets, it’s got to help us get on down to the Cape.”

Besides the fact we didn’t know how to build a rocket, I told him my main objection. “Quentin, we’d just embarrass ourselves. We’d be up against Welch High School students.” This was self-explanatory, I thought. Welch students came from families with fathers who were doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, and bankers, and their high school was the newest, best-equipped school in the county. The Welch Daily News had stories all the time about Welch students going off to college and winning honors. Although we routinely knocked the tar out of them in football, there was no way any Big Creek student was going to beat Welch students head to head in a science fair. “You want it in the paper and everywhere else how we got stomped? How would that look to Dr. von Braun? If you have an ounce of common sense, you’ll drop this idea,” I told him, perfectly aware that he lacked that ounce.

“It’s not like you to be a pessimist,” Quentin said coldly. “I’m totally dumbfounded by your attitude. Dismayed too.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “Astonished, chagrined, and saddened.”

I wasn’t going to let him bait me with his vocabulary. I just shook my head and left him standing in the doorway. I didn’t want to hear any more about it.

NEARLY every Sunday afternoon that year, I thumbed rides to War to visit Dorothy for study sessions. She seemed to enjoy my company, and it wasn’t her fault, after all, that I was in love with her. One Sunday, she stopped studying and looked across the coffee table at me. “Oh, Sonny, I’m so glad we’re such good friends!” she gushed.

“Me too, Dorothy,” I answered, lying. Never had friend been such an awful word.

Emily Sue caught me staring unhappily at Dorothy in the auditorium one morning. Dorothy was holding hands with her latest, a senior basketball player, and I had my lip out about it. Emily Sue sat down in front of me and put her arm up on the seat, looking over it at me. Because she was plump, was a brilliant scholar, and had big, round glasses that gave her face an owllike appearance, it might have been expected that Emily Sue wasn’t popular with the boys, but she was. For one thing, she was one of the best dancers in school. But to me, Emily Sue was what I came to think of as a forever friend, somebody I could tell the truth to without fear of reproach. I just instinctively knew that about her. She also seemed to possess a wisdom far beyond our years. “So what are you going to do about her?” she asked me, nodding toward Dorothy.

“Nothing I can do,” I shrugged, working hard to be nonchalant.

Emily Sue inspected me. “She likes you, Sonny, but to her you’re just her special little friend. That’s probably not ever going to change.”

Her words were like knives plunged into my heart. I abandoned all pretense. “But why?” I whined. “What’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Emily Sue said. “You’re one of the nicest, friendliest kids in this school. Everybody likes you, Sonny. You know why? You like yourself. Look at your brother. He dresses great, he’s a football star, he’s a wonderful dancer—God knows, I love to dance with him—and there’s a lot of girls after him all the time. He’s a big man on campus, but he doesn’t really have any friends. That’s why I think he goes out with so many girls. He’s trying to find someone who will like him for who he is, not because he’s a big football star. Dorothy’s the same way. She’s happy you’re her little friend but she’s going to keep looking somewhere else for love.”